Moral Values

MORAL VALUES….When Mara Vanderslice says that she believes “the religious community can be the conscience and the soul of the Democratic party,” that actually seems like pretty harmless boilerplate to me. At the same time, when Atrios complains that “this is part and parcel with the basic messages people like me get regularly from people all over the spectrum, that atheists and agnostics lack a conscience and a sense of values, and these things only come from religion and the religious” — well, he’s got a point.

The other day, for example, James Joyner linked to a Pew survey designed to figure out your political typology. (It told me I was a “liberal.” Very helpful, guys.) One of the questions was the one below, and, yes, it’s pretty annoying. After all, the reason it’s there is because an awful lot of people — including a lot of loud, rich, influential people with 24-hour TV stations — agree pretty enthusiastically with the sentiment on the right. If we nonbelievers occasionally get a mite touchy about this stuff, that’s why. Just saying.